I met Tom Butler at a California Chiropractic Association conference back in 2019. I was walking the vendor floor, and something about him stopped me. It wasn't a pitch. It was his presence, his clear love of education, and his genuine affinity for energy work. So I decided to try the PEMF machine he was demonstrating.
I had two C-sections in the years before that. Along with the joy of bringing my children into the world came something I didn't expect: numbness and pain in my abdomen that lingered for six years. When I laid on that table and Tom placed the accessories near my scar, I felt my body again for the first time since my last surgery. I bought the machine that day. By February 2020, I had installed it in my own clinic, four stations now, right as the world shut down for COVID. Talk about timing.
But what happened on that table stuck with me more than the timing did. I had felt my body again. And I knew if it could do that for me, it could do it for my patients too, because that's what we're all about here at Well Connected: being embodied, being in alignment, letting our energy balance itself out.
So I invited Tom onto the podcast to explain what PEMF actually is, because he explains it far better than I ever could.
Tom spent his first decade of work as a drug development chemist before he realized that path wasn't fully true to who he was. That search led him into Oriental medicine, eventually earning a doctorate, and about twenty years into a conversation he calls "the energy game." His way of describing PEMF, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, is that it delivers a "fix it signal" into the body. The body is intelligent. Give it that signal, and it starts reorganizing itself toward health on its own.
He explains it two ways. From a Western medical lens, PEMF creates mechanotransduction, essentially a muscle twitch, which sets off a cascade of communication in the body called myokine chemistry. That's the body telling itself what it needs: blood flow, oxygen, building blocks for repair. From a physics lens, he talks about improving the voltage gradient in and around our mitochondria, giving our cells more free energy to do their work, and thinning what he calls the fluid body so nutrients move more easily. He compares a young, healthy cell to a ripe grape. As we age, without support, that grape can start to dry into a raisin. PEMF, in his words, helps keep the grape a grape.
This is exactly why PEMF pairs so well with the Blair upper cervical work we do here. When I deliver a correction, my goal isn't to repeat that same correction every visit. I want it to hold. I want my patients to build the capacity for lasting resiliency. Tom's technology gives the body a resource, a rep, to hold onto that correction and do more with it. Reps get results. That's true whether we're talking about an adjustment or a nervous system that finally gets to rest.
Tom shared something else that stayed with me: cellular vitality declines significantly as we age. By fifty, we have roughly half the vitality we had in our twenties. By seventy-five, half of that again. That's simply how the body is built. But it also means the environmental support we choose to give our bodies matters more, not less, as the years go on.
One of the most common things I hear from patients after a PEMF session is that they finally slept well. Tom explained why: the therapy helps the body's own systems function more smoothly, which includes melatonin production. He described it as a kind of master reset, a way to interrupt a catabolic cycle the body has gotten stuck in and remind it what healthy actually feels like.
Tom's own path into this work came through a personal injury. He wasn't a candidate for surgery, and he didn't want to go the pharmaceutical route. He had a stack of prescriptions on his dresser he never touched. Instead, he spent three days training on a large PEMF machine, and by the end of it, the alarm system his body had been sounding since the injury simply reset. He got his mobility back. He got his life back. That experience shaped every protocol he has taught since.
What I loved most about this conversation was his idea that most disease, physical or emotional, starts with some form of energy deficiency. Depression, chronic pain, slow healing: so much of it traces back to a body that simply doesn't have enough resource to do what it already knows how to do. Give it that resource, even just a nudge, and nine times out of ten, the body takes it from there.
That's the whole philosophy behind PEMF at Well Connected. It isn't just about pain relief or inflammation. It's about giving your body what it needs so it can decide, in its own wisdom, exactly where to send it.
Tom has become one of the most generous supporters of the Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic Society, and I'm deeply grateful for his heart, his science, and his willingness to keep teaching all of us how to help our patients feel like themselves again.
Listen to the full conversation with Tom Butler on the Well Connected Podcast: Live Your Life in Alignment. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Find Tom at https://www.linkedin.com/in/813-tombutler/. Find us at wellconnectedchiro.com.
